A Beautiful Mind and the War on Terror

[WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR A BEAUTIFUL MIND]

A few years ago, I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as brilliant, schizophrenic mathematician John Nash who, upon coming of age and prominence in the Cold War years immediately following World War II, succumbs to numerous delusions and hallucinations due to his illness. One of these hallucinations is a U.S. secret government agent, William Parcher (played perfectly by Ed Harris) who enlists Nash in a top-secret counterterrorism project to prevent the smuggling across the northern U.S. border and detonation of a nuclear bomb by a splinter Soviet terrorist group. This movie (which was made just before 9/11 and released shortly thereafter), portrays his delusion about the terror plot he is working against as an extreme flight of paranoid fantasy. Even after Nash has been confronted with his delusion, he still harbors deep feelings that it is all real. And, after he lets his anti-schizophrenic medication lapse, he begins to see Parcher again. Parcher, in turn, confirms to him the reality of the plot, ratcheting up its crisis level (the bomb is already in the country, in its final stage). Once again, it’s all up to John Nash, with his unique, gifted code-breaking talent to save the day for everybody!

After the horrendous terrorist attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001, our Executive Branch, through agencies such as the Justice Department and Homeland Security, began to broadcast terror alerts to the country. A lot of the alerts simply consisted of pushing up a color-warning system to a higher level without revealing any substantive information about a threat. Other times, a rumor about a threat to a particular area would leak out. And of course, whatever the detailed facts were behind these warnings, this greatly alarmed many people in the general public who had no idea of what to do about them. The threats, in their details, were all top-secret, like William Parcher and his “bomb-plot”. Only instead of one sad, mentally ill person having to absorb the troublesome news, it was an entire nation! There were several occasions in those years immediately following 9/11 that I felt manipulated (rightly or wrongly) by my government, much in the way that Nash was manipulated by Parcher.

A Beautiful Mind is a great movie that contains many truths on many different levels. The acting is incredible and the plot unfolds like a Hitchcock movie, full of sudden twists and surprises. Having said this, it needs to be noted that this movie, based on the book with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, diverges from that book in some crucial areas that would have interfered with the movie’s culminating “moral” message. So, I’d advise anyone who’s seen the movie that the book will “straighten you out” in some areas of John Nash’s story!